n a
muddy skirt and with wisps of damp hair sticking to her pale cheeks.
But they had seen her before. This was not the first occasion, nor yet
the last.

Directly she could slip away from her guests Mrs Fyne ran upstairs.

"I found her in the night nursery crouching on the floor, her head
resting on the cot of the youngest of my girls. The eldest was sitting
up in bed looking at her across the room."

Only a night-light was burning there. Mrs Fyne raised her up, took her
over to Mr Fyne's little dressing-room on the other side of the
landing, to a fire by which she could dry herself, and left her there.
She had to go back to her guests.

A most disagreeable surprise it must have been to the Fynes. Afterwards
they both went up and interviewed the girl. She jumped up at their
entrance. She had shaken her damp hair loose; her eyes were dry--with
the heat of rage.

I can imagine little Fyne solemnly sympathetic, solemnly listening,
solemnly retreating to the marital bedroom. Mrs Fyne pacified the
girl, and, fortunately, there was a bed which could be made up for her
in the dressing-room.

"But what could one do after all!" concluded Mrs Fyne.

And this stereotyped exclamation, expressing the difficulty of the
problem and the readiness (at any rate) of good intentions, made me, as
usual, feel more kindly towards her.

Next morning, very early, long before Fyne had to start for his office,
the "odious personage" turned up, not exactly unexpected perhaps, but
startling all the same, if only by the promptness of his action. From
what Flora herself related to Mrs Fyne, it seems that without being
very perceptibly less "odious" than his family he had in a rather
mysterious fashion interposed his authority for the protection of the
girl. "Not that he cares," explained Flora. "I am sure he does not. I
could not stand being liked by any of these people. If I thought he
liked me I would drown myself rather than go back with him."

For of course he had come to take "Florrie" home. The scene was the
dining-room--breakfast interrupted, dishes growing cold, little Fyne's
toast growing leathery, Fyne out of his chair with his back to the fire,
the newspaper on the carpet, servants shut out, Mrs Fyne rigid in her
place with the girl sitting beside her--the "odious person," who had
bustled in with hardly a greeting, looking from Fyne to Mrs Fyne as
though he were inwardly amused at something he knew of them; and the